ASA bitchslaps Motorola on 'most powerful' Atrix boast

The UK's Advertising Standards Agency has upheld complaints about the TV ad for Motorola's Atrix, which stated that the gadget was "the world's most powerful smartphone".

Two complainants, who either felt enraged enough by this hyperbole to comment or were feeling particularly brand-loyal, said they believed that the Samsung Galaxy SII i9100 had a more powerful processor and therefore challenged Motorola's claims.

Motorola attempted to defend its position by telling the ASA what it really meant was that the Atrix was the most powerful when you included the "Dual Core processor, 1GB RAM, webtop and ecosystem, FLASH 10 PLAYER, qHD display and a 20 per cent more powerful smartphone battery than all known current competitors on a world scale and a biometric reader".

So what it was saying was that when you consider you can plug it into a Lapdock and it'll power a full desktop browser as well as having a good battery, then you could say it was the most powerful.

But the ASA was having none of it and said while the ad did show the other stuff, it "considered viewers would understand the claim 'The world's most powerful smartphone', along with a close-up of the phone, to mean the phone, in isolation, was the most powerful smartphone".

It judged the ad had breached Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) rules on Exaggeration, Misleading Advertisement, Substantiation and Comparisons and banned Motorola from making the claim again. ®